2006-09-16 - 2:11 a.m.

'Singapore, in many ways, is the product of forgettings.' -- Janadas Devan

After months of planning, 25th December 2000 was chosen as the date for the official opening of the new Malay Heritage Museum, which occupied what were previously the grounds of the last symbol of Malay royalty in the country: the Istana Kampung Glam. The area was originally a 23-hectare plot of land provided in 1824 by the British to serve as the Sultan's official residence, in exchange for full authority over the island. Over time, due to conflicts inevitable in a country where land is scarce, the original size dwindled to that of a compound peopled by the Sultan's descendants.

A Malay tabloid journalist who visited the site once wrote an article about the dilapidated state of the compound; the word Istana, which meant 'palace' in Malay, had faded with time, leaving only its incongruous pair, the ‘Kampung’. For that was what the compound had become; its inhabitants used to languorous rhythms of sweeping sand off the doorstep, siestas on cool floorboards, calling in scruffy children from their playtime at dusk. As a matter of fact the journalist had wanted to also point out the phonetic significance of the homonyms 'Glam' and 'glum', but was afraid of angering the Malay community. She considered herself a 'New Malay', whose attitude was supposedly more progressive (and definitely anti-feudalist), immune to the seductive fingerings of nostalgia, but at the same time she did not want to be branded as too 'Westernised'. Such delicate balancing acts were often demanded of the new breed of Malays of which she considered herself a member.

This journalist did patronise certain pubs in Boat Quay, and giggled when she was complimented by Caucasian men for her 'honey-brown skin', so she was constantly wrestling with her social conscience as she drafted her article. Several thoughts streamed through her mind, some of them grave ones and others utterly frivolous: 'Am I betraying anyone, am I looking at this from a position of ethnic self-loathing, does this have anything to do with how I tell people to call me Mona when my real name is Maimunah?'

Eventually in the article she mounted a spirited defence of the government's decision (arrived at, as usual, with 'characteristic efficiency', which in those days was a euphemism for dispensing with consultation and public feedback) to evict the residents so as to use the site as a 'repository for the richness of our legacy'. She admitted a kind of shame at witnessing the shoe-shuffling sense of fatalism that permeated the place, the resignation of 'Old Malays' clinging on to vestiges of their past: obsolete titles and
mythologised heirlooms. One anecdote which particularly pained her was the one about one of the Sultan's descendants who was employed as someone’s chauffeur.

The police were summoned to forcibly remove the few obstinate residents of the palace, the ones who had rejected the attractive resettlement packages offered by the government. Nothing much was reported of the incident, and a small column was printed in the newspaper which reported that work on the Heritage Museum would begin soon. A week later another report was run that highlighted some of the problems that had to be overcome before construction work would be complete. A particularly vivid description of termites hollowing some of the beams in the main building not only allowed the workers a longer time-frame, but also demonstrated the government's foresight at ushering residents out from a building that was a structural hazard. On hindsight, an act of eviction had in fact been a benevolent act of evacuation.

The trouble all started on the day the doors of the Malay Heritage Museum were declared open to the public. On that day, all admission fees were waived and free ketupat and satay were offered to appreciative visitors. Some of the rare and attractive exhibits in the museum included fragments of the destroyed Singapore Stone, whose inscriptions in Majapahit characters still remained a mystery, Hoabinhian stone tools, Neolithic bowls from Kelantan, silverware from Perak, pewter from Selangor, and even bamboo birth talismans used by pregnant Negrito women to ward off evil.

However, the public missed the chance to watch an animatronic model of Abdullah Munsyi, the great scribe to Raffles, describing the loss of important historical documents from Celebes, Borneo and Singapore when the ship that carried Mr and Mrs Raffles back to Europe caught fire. The climax of the robot's narration was when Abdullah Munsyi shod tears at the end of his story, his face contorted with anguish, his metallic voice drenched with unforgiving lament. During a rehearsal, the water used for his tears leaked into the machine's circuitry and resulted in the model being engulfed in flames, and the burnt carcass of Abdullah Munsyi, a mass of melted wax and charred wires, was hidden away in the storeroom. Unknown to the curators, this was the first in a series of jinxes that would plague the museum for the following weeks.

A few strange happenings marred what would have otherwise been an enormously successful museum opening at the revamped Istana Kampung Glam. Apparently, something went awry with the air-conditioning, and some of the rooms were intolerably stuffy whereas others were so cold that visitors could see plumes of condensation curling out from their mouths. But what was perhaps most disconcerting was that a few visitors claimed that they actually saw some of the kris exhibits shifting like compass magnets on their cushion pedestals, their sharp ends pointed menacingly at passers-by. At first these phenomena were attributed to the abnormal ambient temperature, but later the changes become so overt and drastic it was impossible to blame it on any process of 'oxidation' (the word favoured by museum officials).

One of the most affected galleries was the traditional costumes section, which consisted of mannequins donning traditional gear such as Minangkabau head dresses and Jakun
loincloths. As the mannequins were obtained second-hand from a department store, they were mostly fair-skinned versions, with pointed noses and sultry eyes. On the day of the opening, the curators observed that the mannequins had become darker, and it certainly was not due to poor lighting. By the following week, their plastic skins had taken on the leathery tans of fishermen, and when the lights went out at night the contrasting stark white of their eyes could be seen glowing sinisterly in the dark.

The curators, by then a spooked lot, decided to write in to the Malay Minister to complain about their hostile working conditions. They submitted a detailed report which described the various malignant disturbances in the museum, which included: the sound of a woman singing a modern dangdut tune emanating from the toilets, labels being switched around, children's handprints on the glass cases, the unexplained smell of benjamin-gum incense on Thursday nights, and strands of white hair that mysteriously appeared between the teeth of antique jewelled combs sealed in glass tanks.

The Minister dismissed their allegations of supernatural activities and told his secretary, “This is regressive, how can we face the 21st century like this, superstition is a disease of the Old Malays.” He then issued a directive that all the curators be sent for a three-week course to equip themselves with Internet skills. One of them, however, used her formidable newly-acquired homepage-creating talent to set up a website that featured a journal documenting the ghoulish events in the museum. The website's address was www.hantumuseum.com and visitors could see, among other things, snapshots of the freakishly glowering mannequins, mud-brown as if baked by invisible heat lamps.

Maimunah the journalist, always with a nose for good stories, wasted little time revisiting the site. She nodded approvingly at the absence of chicken coops and gravely parking lots, but could not suppress a sense of unease as she ascended the steps into the museum. On each of the curator's faces she detected signs of warning: the shifty eyes; stifled coughs. She peeked into the alternately hot and cold rooms, inspected the telekinetic krises, and laughed secretly as she read the wordings next to a pestle that identified it as an instrument used during circumcision rituals.

But her blood froze when she later stumbled upon a closed-circuit television monitor, and saw herself in it, having dinner with the previous occupants of the Istana Kampung Glam. In her hands was her notebook; she remembered the scene exactly and the thought that had then run through her mind, right after the Tengku had told her, “We are not squatters here. We are the rightful legal owners.” She had been distracted by the plastic tablecloth and its lace patterns, and then had mused silently, “This place is not a palace. It looks just like my mother's home. How did anyone let this happen?”

The week after, Maimunah wrote an article that described the deteriorating termite problem at the museum, which necessitated its indefinite closure. The windows were boarded up, fences erected, the press repelled. Exhausted, she often thought of her current boyfriend, Stefan, and his enthusiastic attitude towards converting to Islam. She wondered what Malay names she could give her children so they would never suffer the indignity of having to reduce them to Western shorthands, like her own. She eventually fell asleep, while scribbling in her diary, and she had a dream where she jotted down these words:

"What you have read so far is a ghost story, in the true sense of the phrase. What this means, as you would know by now, is that like ghosts, this story does not exist. There was no haunted museum. There was no journalist. There were no nervous curators. There were no stubborn phantoms who refused to leave."

When Maimunah woke up the next morning she had no recollection of the dream that she had. She poured some titbits into the cat dish and fixed herself a cup of coffee. Maimunah then stood in her balcony, her coffee mug in one hand and the other shielding her eyes from the sun's blinding rays. After a luxurious yawn and some careful deliberation she decided on ‘Adam’ for the boy, and ‘Lena’ for the girl.

Postscript: This piece was commissioned by The Straits Times Life! in the year 2000 for its annual series of pieces by local writers to tie in with the Christmas season. The stipulations that were dictated to me were simple: the story should include Christmas as a significant date, and that faithful to the year’s particular theme, it should be a ghost story, though flexibility was amply encouraged in how one dealt with the genre.

Upon receipt of the piece, the newspaper decided not to publish it. Among some of the reasons cited, I remember the phrases ‘the Malay ground is not sweet’, and ‘even if the views are your own, we will also be held responsible’. The newspaper, however, honoured its initial agreement with the writers and paid me in full for the piece.

Looking back, I personally feel that the piece strikes me as being a bit reactionary, especially in its judgement of Maimunah as a deracinated Malay woman. It was not my intention to reinforce purist and oppressive notions of cultural authenticity, nor prescribe certain codes of proper ‘ethnic’ behaviour. Maimunah’s own ambivalence towards the destruction of the Istana Kampong Glam should not be causally linked with, or interpreted as a symptom of her rootlessness. However, I do stand by the questions posed by the story: if the story of the Istana’s original inhabitants is erased, what official narrative will replace it? A more recent inquiry haunts me these days: why the need for a Malay museum, when the idea of a ‘national’ museum would be more instrumental in showcasing a ‘multiracial’, rather than racialised history? Will it be recognised that the museum is a product of a political barter: the government did not want to come across as a hostile party that seized something from the Malays, so building a museum was a way of 'giving something back to the Malays'?

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